Over the past week or so:

The ATC data structure has been Organized. This means some Big Things – namely integrating DCR – and it also means a lot of little things. It’s a big deal for me in terms of navigating and backing up the project, it’s a necessary step between where things are and where I need them to be, it’s been a huge pain in the ass… and it has absolutely no bearing on the website or its contents. For the time being, anyway. The organization has had the following effects:

1. All panel renders have been converted from straight tiff to tiff with LZW compression. All – okay, probably most – panel file duplicates and panel CG file duplicates have been weeded out, and all panel-relevant CG data has been filed in the relevant page directory. This has cleaned up the CG source directories, added some size to the page directories, and through elimination and compression cut the project from ~270 gigs plus an additional ~18-20 gigs of Transitional Voices render data down to – at present – 253 gigs.

Which is slightly easier to back up.

2. TD1E has been integrated into the TD2E data structure. It’s cleaner and easier to navigate. Somewhat. That whole “chapter zero” thing still throws the math off when it comes to navigating on the fly.

3. Candy (a thing long-time readers may remember), Logos, tattoos, shirt decals, etc. have all been properly named, organized, and filed.

4. As has the CG. Which took an entire day, in part due to a weird networking glitch that caused XP64 to repeatedly BSOD – but also due to the task running in parallel with panel-related CG organization and mass LZW compression (which would have been unthinkable without a handy Photoshop droplet I took the time to debug). Everything that’s “done” has been properly organized and version-synced, some minor repairs to a few files were made, one file (the S-VHS deck) will need extensive work before I reuse it for anything other than parts, and most everything is “boxed up” and ready to move forward.

5. DCR templates have been “verified” and extensively reworked. DCR.1 page files have been {mostly} cleaned up, standardized, and prepared for the impending rewrite. DCR.2 has a temporary cover and the four complete pages of that chapter have been assembled and prepped for rewrite. The DCR.2 bits will go up when the new website – which I haven’t started on yet – is finished.

So.

The cleaning was a follow-on from the year spent “cleaning” The Dualist and TV, and has lead into the prep-work for DCR (which I’m now ready to start on).

I get that done, and I get the website done, I run a backup to DVD-R (instead of other hard drives), and I’ll finally be in a position to….

… well, to keep finishing stuff. Namely DCR.2. Still finishing? Boo. Making new stuff and actually progressing the story for the first time since 2008 to finish stuff? Yay!

Over the next few days, I’ll be concocting a hopefully-complete list of the CG objects I’ll need to build in order to get things moving again. Then I’ll deal with the website. Then modeling.

New art in March, with any luck!